About

Team size: 170
Major law firms used: Charles Russell Speechlys, DLA Piper, DWF, Fieldfisher, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Herbert Smith Freehills, Kemp Little, Pinsent Masons

The GC and chief legal officer of Pearson, Bjarne Tellmann, has managed to cut more than 40% off the in-house legal department’s fixed costs in the last few years. He is confident he can get a further 20% reduction in the next two years.

‘It took a lot of imagination. If you don’t have the pressure to cut, then you’re obviously not going to do it,’ he comments. ‘But the amount of work is increasing and the resources are flat or reducing, so that forces you to rethink things.’

The 170-strong in-house legal and compliance team, including 150 in legal, is down from about 220 when Tellmann first joined Pearson from The Coca-Cola Company in 2014. The team is spread across six continents and all report on straight lines to Tellmann. He added an associate GC for technology and strategy, Robert Mignanelli, to oversee a legal operations team. But the emergence of an internal transaction service centre, developed with external provider Morae Legal, is credited with providing the biggest change. ‘We’re moving up the food chain in terms of the complexity of agreements we are handling and managing in that centre, and leveraging technology to optimise the process.’

Pearson has also reduced the number of firms on its roster and is looking to create an alternative service provider panel. His vision is a four-tier structure: legal operations co-ordinating in-house lawyers, external law firms and alternative service providers. But this requires restructuring his in-house team to create smaller groups of highly skilled lawyers who work on broader business issues and rely on New Law resourcing when required. His lawyers undertake MBA-style training at various external providers, but Tellmann believes a business school needs to develop a specific legal MBA.

‘None of this is to say that we will significantly reduce our headcount further,’ he comments. ‘We’re at a good place; the next step is about breaking borders, and taking on new and different tasks, not being constricted by buckets and hierarchies. We’ll be much more nimble.’